Adam Sesslar on Fox News

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OK, so it's a week old, but I just saw this clip. Adam Sesslar is the Executive Producer of Rev3 Games. Rev3 does have a history of making violent games, the most popular of which include titles such as God of War and Splinter Cell. Sesslar recently appeared for an interview on Fox News. He was questioned regarding what role violent games may play in violence in society, and specifically for events like Sandy Hook.

I felt Sesslar presented himself very well, pointing out that while there are credible studies out there that link violent video games to aggression, those same studies also link virtually any competitive environment to aggression, including sports, which is also an activity that many of our nation's youth take part in.

I especially liked when the host questioned him about young children playing games that include acts of extreme violence, including murder, such as in the Grand Theft Auto series, and whether or not that's a good idea to have young playing such games. Sesslar simply stated that those are not games intended for a child audience - they are made for adults. There is a rating system on games for a reason, and since the typical game costs about $60, the only way most kids are going to get their hands on such a game is if their parents purchase it. Sesslar goes on to point out that if the title of the game is the name of a felony crime, it's a safe bet that it's not meant to be played by children.

To me, this is just common sense. I'm a gamer, and unsurprisingly, my son really likes games too. But as a parent, you also have to pump the brakes a bit when it comes to what you decided to expose your children to. I've never been a fan of FPS games - Doom was cool, but the novelty quickly wore off. So I would not purchase a game like Medal of Honor or Call of Duty just because that's not a type of game I find entertaining. But there are other violent games out there that I would most definitely purchase, but do not because I think it's inappropriate for my son to see stuff like that. For example, I've played the Assassin's Creed series of games, and would have undoubtedly purchased AC3 except that I feel it's inappropriate for young kids to see that kind of stuff.

Why can't the general population understand that all forms of entertainment (as movies have also been linked into this discussion) have to be taken on a case-by-case basis, and you have to decide for yourself what is appropriate for your child. It's not like you can't expose your child to any violence. Again, to take myself and my child as an example, in the past year, Jack has seen Spiderman and the Avengers at the movie theater and loved them both. He already is excited about the release of Ironman 3 this spring, and I'll take him to see that too. But that doesn't mean I'll take him to go see Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Now I fully understand that this is a gaming website, and thus a lot of what I'm saying is preaching to the choir. But this seems to be a pretty simple concept, and a lot of it boils down to just common sense. Espcially considering that a generation gap between parents and children doesn't really exist any more when it comes to gaming. It may exist with other forms of social media, but people having children now grew up in an era where gaming was becoming more and more popular every year. People with young children today are generally in their 20s, 30s, or 40s. My parents don't necessarily get the infatuation with games, but I feel that's because gaming platforms weren't around when they were children. But for parents of today, games were around when you were a kid, and chances are you played them.

Anyway, here's the Youtube clip of Sesslar's interview:

 

In the 50s it was comic books. All new media are always accused of corrupting the youth. We will probably be aghast at the next generation when we are old and grey.

 

It seems to me that what is and isn't "common sense" depends largely on one's own point of view. We are all experienced gamers, so what Sessler says here regarding game titles and ratings makes perfect sense to you and I. But there are large chunks of the population who don't now - nor will likely ever - understand the appeal or the culture surrounding video games, and will always view them as a waste of time at best and a mysterious pandora's box at worst.

From where I'm sitting, it's the same thing with gun culture.

Likewise, large chunks of the population don't now - nor will likely ever - understand the appeal or the culture surrounding gun ownership, and will always view guns as an unnecessary danger at best and a massacre waiting to happen at worst. But anyone who takes gun ownership seriously will tell you how safe guns are in the hands of law-abiding citizens, and will cite statistics demonstrating that the "scary" guns are used in a tiny minority of crimes. To them, common sense is that the problem with incidents like Sandy Hook is not guns, but mental illness. They will cite anecdotal evidence that they know people with large arsenals who've never committed crimes, and state factually that the big shooting sprees almost always involve a crazy person.

That's not to say I agree with clearly insane men like Wayne LaPierre or think that some gun owners insist on an absurdly-broad interpretation of the Second Amendment to justify playing Rambo. Nor am I suggesting that trained, responsible gun owners don't also occasionally use extremely poor judgement. But both sides would do well to try to understand each others perspective and never, ever take "common sense" for granted.

 

I have to say I'm generally leery whenever someone says "we all know," or "surely something x, y, and z," which seems to invoke DR's common sense, but is actually just a way of saying "we don't actually know because we're suddenly and inexplicably relying on lazy thinking and making assumptions rather than due diligence."

In this case, I'm referring to the interviewer's "it cannot possibly do your brain a heck of a lot of good" comment as regards shooting up a room et al in a video game. The question being, does anyone actually know that? Why do we suddenly not need to have any factual data to go on to determine if it's so?

Genuine common sense is great. It can tell us things like it's not good to bash yourself in the head with a hammer. But it's not so great for drawing conclusions about complex questions. We should leave those conclusions for the people who go to the trouble of actually finding the answers.

 

Ignorant people are always trying to blame video games and guns for the acts of criminals, instead of blaming criminals themselves. The vast majority of gun owners and gamers haven't murdered anyone, nor will they in the future. If the liberals actually cared about putting an end to violent crime, they would be trying to eliminate poverty, instead of taking away our freedom and pushing their political agenda.

 

While certainly true, I think there's an even broader perspective than that. Gaming, especially regarding such titles like Grand Theft Auto and Medal of Honor, are most popular with adoloscent boys and young men. A significant percentage of the population from that demographic is familiar with, and have played, these games. It is also true that the tiny fraction of the crazies who go and shoot up a school, a theater, or a mall also happen to be young men.

It is not surprising - in fact it is to be expected - that when you take an activity that is popular with a certain demographic (gaming) and then look at a sub-set of the demographic (people who commit mass shootings) that many of the activities popular to the group as a whole are also commonly found within the sub-set. It's the classic example of mixing up correlation with causation.

I think it's even more apparent when you take a patently absurd example such as this: If you look at women in their 20s and 30s that commit violent crimes, you will find that a high percentage of them also take birth control pills. No one suggests birth controls pills lead one to commit acts of violence just because birth control use is a common activity for poeple within that demographic.

Maybe they could even go sillier and discover that 40% of all mass shooters use - I don't know - Crest toothpaste, and then link Crest toothpaste use to mass shootings, while ignoring that 40% of everyone in that demographic uses Crest. (Note: I pulled those percentage directly out of my arse, and I mean no offense to Crest toothpaste users.)

These correlation/causation factors only hold up to muster when you find an activity that is relatively uncommon in a given demographic but is common in the subset. To continue with the absurd examples, let's say they found out that 90% of all mass shooters frequently played croquet. I'm pretty sure that's an activity that is NOT particularly common with that demographic, so in that case, you may be onto something.

 

You make an excellent point, though I still view we are looking at this the wrong way. Even if 95% of all croquet players were criminals, or, as you put it, 90% of all mass murders regularly play croquet, that doesn't meant we should ban croquet.

The sole person who should be punished and take the blame for the crime is the perpetrator. We shouldn't blame Isaac Spratt, who is believed to be the founder of croquet, for crimes committed by people who play his game. We shouldn't blame the law abiding players of croquet or the National Croquet Association either. We shouldn't blame anyone but the person who made the choice to kill, rape or steal from someone else.

 

Of course. I'm just saying that even making links of certain activities that a person takes part in, and thus saying that makes him/her a risk factor for violence is in and of itself silly. Especially so if the activity in question is shared by a very large segment of the population.

 

Since nobody else said anything after this comment was made let me point out just how political and/or untrue part of it is.

Liberals are trying to end poverty and it was, most recently, conservatives who complained about liberals wanting to "re-distribute wealth". Thus conservatives, arguably, wanted to preserve poverty.

On violent crime I'll say most liberals and conservatives would like to put an end to it. But liberals see gun control measures (even the weak ones here in the USA) as part of that effort. My understanding is that Australia saw a drop in murders, suicides, and (especially) mass shootings after they put a gun ban in place.

Most liberals in the USA aren't currently pushing for a gun ban but it is hard to see limiting the capacity of a magazine as a "taking away our freedom".

To violent video games. I like to play them and generally don't mind them being sold. Most people I know who played them turned out to be decent human beings.

There are some games I don't like. I see God of War as putting a evil character as the protagonist against another evil without giving you a choice of being good or evil. I like to play good characters (so this puts me off both because if I played it I wouldn't play a good character and because I am not allowed to choose.) But just because I don't like them doesn't mean I think gaming companies should be banned from making them.

One of the things I liked about a version of Mortal Kombat that came out is that it allowed a player to put a well deserved (IMO) fatality on Kratos.

 

Liberal welfare is designed to keep people dependent on the system and keep them in power, not to empower the people or improve their lives. I think you'll also find a significantly large portion of liberals, perhaps even the majority of liberals, do indeed support banning guns. All one needs to do is look at the recently proposed ban on semi-automatics and standard capacity magazines. Not to mention various other gun control attempts over the years, including successful handgun bans in Chicago and the District of Columbia (though both were struck down as unconstitutional).

The left wants you to think that Obama is a "hero of the Second Amendment" and that he "loves guns," but that couldn't be further from the truth. For instance, Obama recently said:

Not only is his "all the time" statement dubious at best, but one must also consider the man's history. Obama is a politician, he'll say anything to make himself look good. But does Barack Obama really stand by his recent statement? To answer this question, one need only look at his voting record and the statements he made prior to running for president.

For an all encompassing look at every aspect of the gun control debate, and Barack Obama's true views on the subject, I suggest you read this essay I wrote last year:

I originally posted this on a couple of forums I used to go to, but I eventually left those forums, including a site where I had around 2000 posts and was a member for a long time. I left those forums because I had become a "partisan hack," which is to say that I had become so polarized that I began to hate the far-left with such a fervor that I let it get to me. I had begun seeing liberals in my cereal (not really, but it's a figure of speech).

I didn't want to be a person consumed by hatred of any kind, however, so I abandoned my overly polarized ways. That was a few months ago now, but I think I've done a good job with it for the most part. This essay I wrote, however, was one of my few good works back then and I did my best to avoid demeaning the left. In fact, I think you'll find that I didn't use the term "liberal" once in my paper, aside from a brief reference to classical liberalism, which is the exact opposite of modern left-wing "liberalism."

 

I will just run off and get Ragusa. I think there is finally a job for him again.

 

Just with regards to your frustrations about political leanings, keep in mind that you have a two party system, a centre-right and a centre-left party, extreme views on both sides never get any real, long term traction because they are too far outside of the mainstream, where the majority of people live.

Your freedoms are enshrined in law and protected ad infinitum, you will likely see a constitutional amendment in your lifetime with regards to the size of the gun and magazine you're allowed to own, but pistols, shotguns and hunting rifles will never be banned. Both my grandfathers owned shotguns, because they both lived on farms and pest/feral animals were a fact of life. I'll never see (and wouldn't want to see) guns banned in Australia, because there will always be pest/feral animals showing up on farms, and those who want to hunt, and shoot for sport.

Arctic I want to link you a video... sorry for the repost anybody who saw it last time I linked it, but it's just a short clip, a glimpse at how gun control went down in Australia:



edit:
Sorry just realised I neglected the original topic, I didn't really have much to add, save that Adam Sessler spoke quite well.

 

I think you misunderstand the size of the gun control lobby, there's never going to be an amendment to the Constitution that will repeal the Second Amendment or place restrictions on gun rights. In America we have purposely made it virtually impossible to amendment the Constitution. Us Americans love our guns and freedom and even if such an amendment happened to make it through Congress, it would be destroyed long before 3/4 of the people in 3/4 of the states ratified it.

Unfortunately they may not require an amendment to the Constitution, all Barack Obama has to do is wait for a couple of Supreme Court justices to retire and then put anti-American justices up. The Supreme Court picks and chooses which cases it hears, it could very well refuse to hear any case on any unconstitutional law, thus keeping it in affect. Alternatively, the Supreme Court could (unconstitutionally) circumvent the Bill of Rights entirely, as it did with the National Firearms Act of 1934. What makes this scary is that these judges hold lifetime positions so you can expect anything they do to stay in place for at least half a century, regardless of how unpopular their decision is.

Why do you think the indefinite detainment of American citizens without trial (NDAA of 2012) hasn't been struck down? Or warrant-less wire-taping of American citizens (Patriot Act)? Or the anti-protest bill (H.R. 347)?

 

Yeah, there's a gun control lobby, but in size - and more importantly in funding - it is dwarfed by the pro-gun NRA. (Although the NRA isn't nearly as large as many people think. It has about 3 million members - certainly nothing to sneeze at - but that's only about 1% of the US population.)

I think the main reason you'll see so little action in Congress - not just on gun reform, but on much of anything - is that there is little incentive for most members of Congress to do anything. Following the last census we redrew the boundaries of Congressional districts, and one of the results of this was to create very few swing districts. There was a recent article on 538 that showed fewer than 20% of the Congressional districts in the nation are truly in play. Over 80% of them in the fall of 2012 had the winning candidate win by a double digit percentage over his competition, with 50% of the districts having the double digit win exceed 20 percentage points.

So these districts are non-competitive. The party that holds the seat in that district will continue to hold the seat for the foreseeable future so long as they have that "D" or "R" next to their name. What this means in practice is that it is more likely that a member of Congress will lose their seat due to a primary challenge within their own party than they are to lose to the opposition party. To take that logic a step further, it provides a disincentive for these members to compromise. Moving towards the center may in fact make them less electable in future years, because their district is already highly liberal or highly conservative.

Anti-American justices? I know some of the justices are quite liberal, and others quite conservative, but anti-American is a new one for me. Are you saying they aren't patriotic? Are they fist bumping with terrorists? Sowing subversion across the nation? I can't say I agree with many of the SC decisions I have read over the years, but agree or not, I never considered any of the Justices to be anti-American. You mentioned that you stopped posting in another forum because many there considered you a partisan hack. Calling SC Justices anti-American just because you don't agree with their decisions is a good means of developing that reputation. Just sayin'...

SC Justices just don't retire when they feel like it, with no mind to who the sitting president happens to be. You think it's just conincidental that the liberal Justices tend to retire when there is a Democrat in office, and the conservative ones tend to retire when there is a Republican in office? It is certainly possilbe that Obama will add to his current total of two SC appointments, but the most likely member of the court to retire is Ruth Bader-Ginsburg. She will turn 80 this year, and is one of the liberal Justices, so replacing a liberal Justice with another liberal Justice will do little to shift the current balance of power within the SC.

In fact, there is only one sitting conservative Justice that I would think would be considering retirement - Scalia. He's 76. But you can bet your nuts that he won't be retiring before 2017 provided his health holds up. While there's no guarantee we'll have a Republican president in 2017, he doesn't want Obama picking his replacement. The other conservative justices would be retiring at unusually young ages if they stepped down in the next few years. Thomas is 64, Alito is 62, and Roberts is just 57.

Kennedy is often considered the swing Justice, and at 76 he may be considering retirement in the next few years. His retirement could potentially swing the court in a more liberal direction. But as you said, since his appointment is for life, if he feels he would not be comfortable with who Obama would nominate to replace him, he could just wait out Obama's term. (Kennedy is in good health - even at 76 there's no reason to suspect that he couldn't serve another 4 years.)

So right now you have 4 liberal justices, 4 conservate justices, and 1 swing justice. Since SC Justices tend to retire when the presidency is occupied by someone who holds similar philosophical views as they do, it would be odd for the court to be occupied by fewer than 4 liberal and 4 conservate justices for the foreseeable future. The only exception to this is Kennedy - if he is eventually replaced by a judge that is liberal or conservative (which again will be determined by who the president is) you could add a 5th to one of groups, but we can't predict that now, as he has shown no intentions of retiring any time soon.

 

Arctic thank you for being open enough to say how you were starting to feel a few months back, but you should worry about a couple of things.

1. Being rational and fact based.
2. Being paranoid as much as you noticed you were being consumed by hate.

You actually came to realize something was wrong and stopped using the word "liberal". But the word isn't the problem as much as asking if you are looking at the facts. Now politics is dumped over with emotion. Part of that is because issues matter and people believe in stuff. But another part of that groups gin up emotion to manipulate people into doing things they want voting for ___, spending time and money on ____, (which may or may not be a bad thing depending on the candidate or cause) and (this is a bad thing IMO) ignoring what the other side has to say.

On current politics.

It isn't if liberals want to ban guns or not. The question is what are liberals talking about *doing*. What they are talking about doing is something other than banning guns or most guns.

On guns.

I try to take, what I hope, is a pragmatic approach. I see some situations where concealed carry is good and others where it is bad. I also look for results.


Australia had a gun ban with what may be some good results.
Less murder and suicide
http://andrewleigh.org/pdf/GunBuyback_Panel.pdf

And this despite it being criticized in an untruthful manner.
http://www.snopes.com/crime/statistics/ausguns.asp

As for concealed carry.... I'm not convinced it has been a success. I live in Wisconsin and we were one of the last states to allow concealed carry (only in 2011).

People who follow or are in the NRA talk about Illinois a bunch but tend not to mention pre-concealed carry Wisconsin. Wisconsin has had a lower murder rate than many concealed carry states when it was not concealed carry.

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0308.pdf

Illinois has Chicago-which many in Wisconsin (rightly or wrongly) see as crime and corruption laden. Chicago may also be unlucky enough to be currently facing a new phase of street gang or semi-gang formation and warfare. If it is I would think gangs having it out with each other tends to increase the murder rate-guns or no-and bring a sense of lawlessness.


Now to poverty.

Why is it that some of the most politically conservative states have higher poverty rates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_poverty_rate

Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi are currently each "red" states (some say Texas may change but it hasn't just yet). Yet have amongst the worst poverty in the US.

Vermont-which produced Howard Dean and currently has the only US Senator to carry a "Socialist" label is among the states with the least poverty.



Touching on history.

You mentioned being "anti-American". You didn't come up with that term nor the term "un-American". I come from Wisconsin-which at one point elected Sen. Joe McCarthy. The guy ruined some peoples' lives by being untrue about or slandering them during the "red-scare".

I've heard some try to justify him by saying that he woke the US up to the threat of communism yet I think the threat of war with the Soviets did that without him. I wonder (I could be wrong) if part of the reason Joe McCarthy encouraged paranoia is so that people would turn to him and vote him in as a supposed defense against whatever they were *encouraged* to be paranoid about.

I'm sure Japan and Germany had spies in the USA but that didn't justify what the US did to a lot of innocent Japanese during WWII with internment camps-and is especially ironic considering Japanese-American troops fought bravely in the US Army.

Paranoia and encouraged paranoia have a history in US politics and government. Yet the results are sometimes bad and paranoia doesn't encourage us to stop and think about the results.

That doesn't mean there weren't threats. The Soviets had spies in the USA and there was a real danger of war. But taking things to a point of paranoia.. well I mentioned some of the results of that already.



Aldeth,

I tend to think of Kennedy as a swing vote who leans conservative-don't forget he went against Obamacare when many talking heads expected him not to.




To something more directly on topic.

Part of the reason I'm cautious about efforts to ban games is because I don't see results than show it should be done. If anything I've seen at least some that show it does not need to be.

 

Thank you for being understanding, you're right, there's much more to not being a "partisan hack" than simply refusing to use demeaning words, like "liberal." I've definitely noticed more than just that though about how I've changed over the months since deciding to become less polarized. I've even accepted a few "left-wing" policies, such as "free" (tax payer funded) higher education (through community colleges) for everyone.

The Australia gun ban didn't have much of an at all, "gun violence" remained on the same trend as before, but overall violence went up by 40%. Aside from disarming law abiding citizens, It didn't have much of an impact at all, though that is to be expected seeing as how rifles are only used in an extremely tiny fraction of crimes; in the US you're more likely to be murdered with a hammer than any kind of rifle.


Sources
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323777204578195470446855466.html
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/uc...s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8

 

With regards to the article you linked, that referenced a 2003 study (available here), even though their data set was by their own admission was small, the authors reached similar conclusions to what would be drawn 10 years later in more indepth research (presented below). In contrast to the opinion piece referencing this research, the thrust of the research is quite different when taken in context.

"the interventions had modest effects on the extent of suicide and violent crime. Suicide rates did not fall, though there was a shift toward less use of guns, continuing a very long-term decline. Homicides continued a modest decline; taking into account the one-time effect of the Port Arthur massacre itself, the share of murders committed with firearms declined sharply. Other violent crime, such as armed robbery, continued to increase, but again with fewer incidents that involved firearms. This relatively small effect is hardly surprising given that the type of firearms prohibited had not previously been used frequently in crime or suicide, as well as the low power of the potential tests, with less than five years of postban data."

Due to the authors own concerns about their small data set limiting the power of their conclusions, to provide a clearer picture I'd like to submit some recent research, from Wilfrid Laurier University, 2012 (Toronto, Canada) and from Harvard University, 2011:

In 1997, Australia implemented a gun buyback program that reduced the stock of firearms by around one-fifth (and nearly halved the number of gun-owning households). Using differences across states, we test whether the reduction in firearms availability affected homicide and suicide rates. We find that the buyback led to a drop in the firearm suicide rates of almost 80%, with no significant effect on nonfirearm death rates. The effect on firearm homicides is of similar magnitude but is less precise. The results are robust to a variety of specification checks and to instrumenting the state-level buyback rate. JEL (I12, K14)
Andrew Leigh, Research School of Economics, Australian National University and Christine Neill, Department of Economics, Wilfrid Laurier University
source.

For Australia, the NFA seems to have been incredibly successful in terms of lives saved. While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the NFA, resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres.
The NFA also seems to have reduced firearm homicide outside of mass shootings, as well as firearm suicide. In the seven years before the NFA (1989-1995), the average annual firearm suicide death rate per 100,000 was 2.6 (with a yearly range of 2.2 to 2.9); in the seven years after the buyback was fully implemented (1998-2004), the average annual firearm suicide rate was 1.1 (yearly range 0.8 to 1.4). In the seven years before the NFA, the average annual firearm homicide rate per 100,000 was .43 (range .27 to .60) while for the seven years post NFA, the average annual firearm homicide rate was .25 (range .16 to .33).
Additional evidence strongly suggests that the buyback causally reduced firearm deaths. First, the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates.
Firearms summaries provided by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.
Contributors: David Hemenway, PhD; Mary Vrinitois, MS
source.

p.s.
thanks Taluntain for fixing the youtube link in my previous post

 

It's interesting to look at the gun bans in Australia and Britain, as they paint very odd pictures. As you pointed out in Australia, there was no change in overall "gun violence" after the gun ban, as crime rates remained consistent. This caused all other forms of violence to skyrocket. You point out that after the gun ban there were no massacres of any kind massacres after the gun ban, which is true, yet the massacres committed prior to the Port Arthur massacre were committed almost entirely with shotguns and bolt-action rifles, not semi-automatic rifles.

Great Britain shows another story, where guns have been controlled by the state since the 1920s and 1960s and crime rates have continued to rise drastically over this time. Guns were, for all intents and purposes, banned entirely in 1988 after the Hungerford massacre and the passage of the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988. Yet prior to Hungerford, there were no mass shootings for over twenty years, with the latest incident being the Braybrook Street massacre in 1966, which involved a handgun. After the gun ban in 1988, there were three mass murders: the Dunblane massacre, 7/7 bombings and Cumbria massacre.

As for gun control in America and it's atrocious affects, all one needs to do is read my essay posted above. All of these European/Australian massacres have the same thing in common, the people were disarmed and unable to defend themselves. All of the massacres went on for hours and in some cases, even days. It's irrelevant, however, as the point of the right to bear arms isn't hunting, target shooting or self-defense, it's to safeguard freedom. That's not to say Europe/Australia should adopt concealed (and open) carry, because they obviously should, I was merely pointing out that we need not forget the real reason that all free peoples have the right and responsibility to bear arms.